Make Warcraft, Not Love
The on-again, off-again obsession with World of Warcraft which occasionally grips our house (and especially one half of our house) has struck again, and for reasons he explains himself, The Mrs has started a Warcraft blog.
Stop by and make him feel loved, won't you?
A Place I’ve Dreamed Of
It's been The Mrs' last weekend in SF, so apologies if I've been a bit too otherwise-occupied to blog. But one of the things I started to plan almost from the minute we agreed that he was going to come over is a trip to Sausalito on his last weekend. There are a couple of reasons, including that the ferry across from SF, with the sea lions playing alongside the boat, is a brilliant experience, and Sausalito is pretty enough in its slightly twee way. But the main reason is that every time I've ever taken that ferry I've seen the hotel alongside the ferry dock and thought "One day I'll stay there." And since I met The Mrs and started coming to SF on a regular basis, the thought of staying there with him has been lodged in my brain.
It's The Inn Above Tide, and it is quite literally built out over the water of San Francisco Bay. It's got the most amazing views back across to the city, with the whole panorama of the rest of the bay, including Alcatraz and the Bay Bridge. Worth a splurge for Himself's last weekend I thought. And in itself, it really was. Great (huge) room, with yer actual real fire, and a balcony out over the water. Except that the appalling weather that dogged the first few days of his trip was back with a vengeance. The rain, winds and fog made the views effectively non-existant, and every time we went outside it seemed to coincide with a particularly vicious or heavy squall.
Obviously in no way my fault, but somehow it made me feel a bit of a failure as a husband.
Normal Service
No, not a reference to regular blogging (though I really do keep trying - but I've just been back to the UK for all of 48 hours, FFS!), but to dinner last Saturday night in our hotel in Monterey. Yes, we took a car and drove down the Pacific coast on Highway 1 - stunning as ever. And we were going to go out and eat swanky, but once we'd made it to the hotel we couldn't be bothered to go back out. So we went downstairs and had an actually very pleasant meal.
But before our order had been taken, suddenly all the lights were turned up to full. Slightly dazzled, we waited to see if they'd be turned down, but they weren't. then a waitress came by to explain that a customer had been taken ill and they'd needed to turn the lights up to be able to see to help her. Actually, we thought that them taking the trouble to tell us that was pretty good, so we didn't mind.
Then we saw the drama unfolding. I was facing the right way to notice that an elderly lady was leaning forward with her head on the table, looking like she was being sick. Suddenly, the calamari sounded a lot less appealling.
*Then* I noticed that the man from the next table along from ours was over there with them, and appeared to be dabbing the back of her head with a napkin.
Eventually, her dining companion left the table saying that he would bring the car round, while our dining neighbour was creating a very fetching tourniquet around her head with more napkins. At this point we could only assume she'd somehow fallen and cracked her head, but how badly could she have fallen backwards to have done that much damage. they wheeled her out in a wheelchair which I didn't see them bring over, so presumably it was her own, which makes the circumstances of any injury even harder to fathom. It was all very peculiar.
Anyway, our waiter then returned to resume service, and the couple at the table next to us were given their dinner on the house. Which was pretty jammy considering tehy'd been drinking champagne...
You Hum It…
I've been coming to San Francisco on and off since 1993, and in all that time I didn't even know there were hummingbirds in Northern California, let alone seen any. Then Bam! The Mrs arrives and suddenly they're everywhere. There's even one that frequents my downstairs neighbour's terrace.
Now it's the case that I've never actually seen a hummingbird in the flesh anywhere before this, so I wasn't wholly prepared for the slightly freaky sense that, because they're so incredibly still, they must actually be standing on something that you just can't see....
A Valentine’s Day Jumper
As The Mrs and I don't 'do' Valentine's, we just went to the cinema last night. Doug Liman's new film Jumper is about an American teen who discovers that he can teleport, the lifestyle he uses the ability to create for himself, and how it all goes wrong when he comes to the attention of a group called the Paladins, whose (holy?) mission is to erradicate all Jumpers. Yes, it turns out there are a lot of these people out there.
This film represents ninety minutes of our lives we're never getting back, and we wuz robbed. It's difficult to know where to start in trashing this film, but let me try:
It's got no plot to speak of.
It's got Hayden Christensen in it, making some of the 'acting' from his Star Wars days look award-worthy.
It's just dull. Not what you want in an action movie.
It hasn't got an ending. Seriously, it's just got a series of scenes that all seem designed to start threads in possible sequels.
As The Mrs said as we left; "You know you're in trouble when all I was thinking during the last scene was "Her hair is the best thing in this film"."
Avoid.
New Airline
You'll have gathered that I fly a lot. But I tend to fly a lot to the same places, and generally use the same airlines. It's not often I get on a plane belonging to a company I've never flown with before. But it happened last weekend, when we flew to Seattle with Alaska Airlines for the first time.
Curiously, it all seemed pretty much exactly the same as every other US-based airline I've flown with. But then, I haven't flown with Virgin America yet.
So, Seattle
Great weekend (not great weather); had a wander round Pike Place Market and once again wondered why there's nothing that feels even remotely comparable anywhere in the UK; stayed a couple of nights in a nice hotel, though were somewhat upset that their motif goldfish kept turning up dead in various bowls around the place; went on the Underground Tour*, which is excellent, and had possibly the best tour guide in the world, ever; met one or two people we hadn't seen since their wedding and had a thoroughly delightful evening of pizza and cocktails, and generally chilled.
* Special note for Terry Pratchett fans: You know Ankh-Morpork? You know all that stuff about what it's built on being Ankh-Morpork? Where the pavements were ten feet below the road, and the 'seamstress' euphemism for 'prostitute' led to the census result of thousands of seamstresses within x blocks of the docks, and one needle? Yeah, that's all Seattle.
And oddly, I think somewhere along the line I'd picked up that it's all Seattle. Possibly from a footnote in one of the books.
HONK!
Woken very early this morning by a chorus of foghorns from all directions and the sight of thick fog crawling across the city below us and below and actually quite clear dawn. As The Mrs said "the sky is upside down". And now a couple of hours later there's *nothing* to see out of the window.
Great day we picked to get on a plane and head up to Seattle....
What A Super Tuesday
Well, as would be expected, I sat glued to the TV for large parts of yesterday evening as the results and analysis came in from the various primaries and caususes (caucusi?) around the US. And like many people I suspect, I was disappointed that no juggernaut-like candidates emerged from the rubble. McCain is clearly out in front on the Republican side, though people seem to be treating him as less than a sure thing, but this ding-dong battle between Hillary and the dull one is just showing no sign of being resolved anytime soon.
And I'm sorry - he is dull. And a word I've found myself using in discussions; unconvincing. I'm sure he's a very effective Senator, and he's a not bad speaker, but I can't for the life of me work out what difference he thinks he'd make, or how he'd have any greater impact as President as he's got as Presidential Hopeful. He doesn't seem ever really to stand up and say anything that really makes him stand out.
And as for all this rubbish about people opposing Hillary because she's out for power? Hello? They're running for President! Is there some sense in which we should believe they don't all want power?